Every single day, the U.S. government gathers and stores more than a billion phone calls, emails, text messages, photographs and Internet searches. Just about every form of electronic communication that you can possibly imagine is being harvested. In fact, it has been reported that NSA personnel gather 2.1 million gigabytes of data every hour. This is being done even though it is a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution. Sadly, most Americans do not even know what the Fourth Amendment actually says. For those that do not know, the Fourth Amendment says the following: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Unfortunately, our leaders have totally abandoned the Constitution. They seem to believe that they have the right to look through our electronic communications any time they want and that we should not complain about it. As you will see below, workers at the NSA have even eavesdropped on very intimate conversations between soldiers serving in Iraq and their female loved ones back home. What kind of sick person would do such a thing? Sadly, the truth is that we have allowed ourselves to become a “Big Brother society”, and we are an utter disgrace to the millions of brave men and women who have died to defend our freedoms.

The Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing. The Obama administration sees nothing wrong with this at all.

Will some of our other “leaders” step forward and condemn this blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution?

Sadly, so far most of our politicians are rigorously defending the program. Just check out how some prominent members of Congress responded to this story…

Senator Dianne Feinstein: “There is nothing new in this program. The fact of the matter is, that this was a routine three-month approval under seal that was leaked”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid: “Everyone should just calm down and understand this isn’t anything that is brand new. It’s been going on for some seven years. And we’ve tried often to try to make it better, and we’ll continue to do that”

But the collection of phone call metadata is just the tip of the iceberg.

The truth is that government surveillance of Americans citizens goes far beyond what you are being told.

In fact, the Washington Post has just come out with an article about a highly classified program known as PRISM that involves the federal government “tapping directly into the central servers” of nine top Internet companies…

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.

The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy. Even late last year, when critics of the foreign intelligence statute argued for changes, the only members of Congress who knew about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.

So what Internet companies are involved? Most of the names will be extremely familiar to you…

The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war.

Dropbox , the cloud storage and synchronization service, is described as “coming soon.”

Another whistleblower, former NSA code breaker William Binney, has come forward with some astounding details about what is actually happening over at the NSA. The following is from a recent Business Insider article…

Binney — one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history — worked for the Defense Department’s foreign signals intelligence agency for 32 years before resigning in late 2001 because he “could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution.”

He’s detailed how, ever since 9/11, the NSA has run a top-secret surveillance program that amasses electronic data — phone calls, GPS information, emails, social media, banking and travel records, entire government databases — and analyzes the information “to be able to monitor what people are doing” and who they are doing it with.

And other NSA whistleblowers claim that the agency “has the capability to do individualized searches, similar to Google, for particular electronic communications in real time through such criteria as target addresses, locations, countries and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email.”

But this is not supposed to be happening. The NSA is not supposed to be spying on U.S. citizens and it is a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution.

But they are doing it. In fact, they are gathering so much information on all of us that they needed to build a brand new data storage center out in Utah.

The NSA says the Utah Data Center is a facility for the intelligence community that will have a major focus on cyber security. The agency will neither confirm nor deny specifics. Some published reports suggest it could hold 5 zettabytes of data. (Just one zettabyte is the equivalent of about 62 billion stacked iPhones 5′s– that stretches past the moon).

Why do they need so much storage space?

Well, after you start putting the pieces together, it becomes very clear.

They are illegally spying on all of us, and the American people need to be told the truth.

But of course there are always numbskulls out there that say things like this…

“I don’t have anything to hide so I don’t care if they watch everything that I do.”

Really?

If you think that way, perhaps you will change your mind after you read what some NSA employees have been doing. The following is from an article posted on theatlanticwire.com…

And the NSA would never abuse its awesome surveillance power, right? Wrong. In 2008, NSA workers told ABC News that they routinely eavesdropped on phone sex between troops serving overseas and their loved ones in America. They listened in on both satellite phone calls and calls from the phone banks in Iraq’s Green Zone where soldiers call home. Former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk described how a coworker would say, “Hey, check this out… there’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny, go check it out.” Faulk explained they would gossip about the best calls during breaks. “It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, ‘Wow, this was crazy.’”

We live during a time when government agencies are massively abusing their powers. We have seen this recently with the IRS, the Justice Department and now with the NSA.

But so far, most Americans don’t seem too upset by all of this abuse of power. Most Americans are so apathetic that they seem content to let the government get away with almost anything.

In the end, America will get the government that it deserves. If Americans do not stand up now and speak out, it will be a signal to the government that this kind of behavior is okay and we will see even more of it.

In these post-constitutional days it’s not just the government that is out to violate your rights. Count on Corporate America to be a co-conspirator.

In one-two knock-out punch to the Fourth Amendment, officials within the Obama Administration have secretly authorized major telecom firms to intercept communications carried on portions of their networks, C/NET reports, noting that the practice, under federal wiretapping laws, would otherwise be illegal. Carriers include AT&T and other major ISPs – Internet service providers.

Per C/NET:

The secret legal authorization from the Justice Department originally applied to a cybersecurity pilot project in which the military monitored defense contractors’ Internet links. Since then, however, the program has been expanded by President Obama to cover all critical infrastructure sectors including energy, healthcare, and finance starting June 12.

(Question: Before entering politics, wasn’t President Obama some sort of constitutional professor? I’m just asking because that seems relevant here – and because no one in the Praetorian Washington Press Corps is going to. And what copy of the Bill of Rights is Attorney General Eric Holder using?)

According to the report, the documents showed that the National Security Agency (NSA), which is located on the grounds of Ft. Meade, Md., and the Defense Department were heavily involved in lobbying for the secret legal authorization. NSA Director Keith Alexander actually participated in some of the discussions personally.

“Despite initial reservations, including from industry participants, Justice Department attorneys eventually signed off on the project,” C/NET said, indicating that Justice officials knew good and well what NSA and DoD was requesting was unconstitutional – that is, before they decided to play along.

As part of the agreement, the Justice Department said it will grant legal immunity to any participating network providers, backed up with what participants in the confidential discussions said were “2511 letters,” in reference to the Wiretap Act codified at 18 USC 2511 in federal statutes.

“The Wiretap Act,” C/NET reported, “limits the ability of Internet providers to eavesdrop on network traffic except when monitoring is a ‘necessary incident’ to providing the service or it takes place with a user’s ‘lawful consent.'”

One industry rep told the online magazine that the 2511 letters give ISPs legal immunity – stay-out-of-jail cards, if you will – and a promise from the Justice Department not to prosecute them for any criminal violations of the Wiretap Act. C/NET said it wasn’t clear how many of the 2511s were issued.

Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn, in 2011, publicly disclosed some details of the original project, called the DIB Cyber Pilot. In May 2012, the project was transformed into an ongoing program, which was much broader but still voluntary. It was then the Department of Homeland Security became involved in it for the first time. Renamed the Enhanced Cybersecurity Services program in January, it is currently being expanded once again, this time to all tech and information firms that operate “critical” infrastructure.

If you’re wondering why Congress isn’t outraged and taking action, you should know that this is likely being done with tacit congressional approval. Both the House and Senate intelligence committees, in their oversight role, have almost certainly been briefed about this little Fourth Amendment violation, so don’t expect any help from the Legislative Branch – though clearly Congress has a role, as well as a duty to act. Last month the non-partisan Congressional Research Service published a report concluding the Executive Branch most likely does not have the authority to circumvent the Privacy Act unless Congress changes the law.